Symbols of Ireland

Nicola Gordon Bowe

The crucial part symbols can play in the visualization of a
nation has attracted interest and debate in recent years. Whether
symbols are associated with political aspiration and conflict, with
romantic national pride in past achievements, with perceived
identity, or with the personification of race, their history and
continuing use can tell us a great deal about the history of the
country in question.

As Ewan Morris has written,

“Symbols are
distinguished from other signs by three important characteristics:
the emotional charge which they carry, the complex web of
associations attached to them, and the fact that they represent
ideas or emotions which are difficult, if not impossible to express
in words alone”.

Furthermore, the ambiguity of symbols means that ,
“in the case of national symbols, there will be a variety of
interpretations of the values and ideals of the nation for which
they stand”, and this “rich mixture of meanings and associations
which they evoke” gives them much of their power, leading to “a
continuous and stable sense of identity”. They synthesise past
experience, express the present by reflecting the solidarity of the
state, and signal the future.

Most of the symbols traditionally associated with Ireland and her
representation were either invented or revived to evoke the spirit
of the 1798 Rebellion, popularised by the Young Irelanders in the
1840s and consolidated during the Celtic Revival.

Along with the
revival of interest in the Irish language, music, literature,
architecture, sculpture and the applied arts, images of Ireland
played a crucial role in defining this extended period of fervent
political and cultural nationalism which gathered momentum during
the second half of the 19th century and culminated in the
establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922.

In the interim, the
first ever national trade mark, a stylised interlaced letter ‘E’
motif inscribed ‘Déanta in Eireann’ introduced in 1906, declared
support for native endeavour, while versions of the much- reproduced
8th century Tara brooch, discovered in 1850 and the popular Galway
‘Claddagh’ ring, proclaimed the wearer’s nationalist affiliations,
as might the colour and other accessories of the dress worn.

Depictions of Ireland as a green-clad Hibernia, or as the maid of
Erin, the pale, resilient, deceptively vulnerable, raven-haired, the
harp, strung, unstrung or reinvented in its ancient form, the
shamrock, the rising sun of the Fianna (the legendary warriors
associated with the otherworldly hero Fionn mac Cumhaill) and later
the Fenians, the round tower (whose mysterious early Christian
bell-tower form was first analyzed by the antiquarian George Petrie
in 1833), the Celtic cross, the ruined chapel, the wolfhound
(re-bred in the 19th century, emulating the legendary hounds of
Fionn and Oisin) and the Red Hand of Ulster (first used in the 14th
century by Hugh Reamhar O’Neill of Tyrone) are legion. They
preceded those of the shanahie (storyteller), the Wexford pikeman,
Daniel O’Connell the Liberator, the wonder-working saints
St. Patrick (Ireland’s patron saint by the 1780s), St. Colmcille and
St. Brigid, similarly enduring icons associated with Ireland.

Such
symbolic images could be found, increasingly set in bounding
formalised interlaced patterns ending in dragons’ heads,
incorporated into 19th century public buildings and sculpture, both
secular and ecclesiastical. Examples include J. O’Meara’s Irish
House on the Dublin Quays, the Father Mathew Memorial Hall
proscenium in Dublin’s Church Street, and the stuccoed building
facades of the North Kerry artisan Pat McAuliffe; carved bog oak
jewellery, souvenirs and inlaid furniture; Belleek porcelain;
commemorative glassware and silver bearing the crowned harp
hallmark; embroidered banners, book covers and illustrations and a
rich variety of printed ephemera. They had become recognizably
symbolic of Ireland in popular visual imagery, music and literature
by the beginning of the nineteenth century.

For example, the well-known epithet describing Ireland as “The
Emerald Isle” was first used by the Belfast United Irishman and
poet, William Drennan, in his poem, ‘When Erin First Rose’ in 1795.
Even the tricolour, the popular name of the Republic of Ireland’s
green, white and orange flag adopted by the Irish Free State in
1922, first appeared at the Irish Confederation gatherings of 1848.

The inspiringly romantic imagery of Thomas Davis’s Young Ireland
newspaper, The Nation (1842 - ) was deliberately used to boost a
demoralised, land-torn people and build up a dynamic reservoir where
tradition could be transformed into material advancement and
intellectual/spiritual growth. Symbols such as the Sword of Light
(An Claidheamh Soluis) appeared as a 1903 colophon device
handprinted by the Yeats’ Dun Emer Press, as the title of the Gaelic
League’s newspaper, on one of the first four Irish Free State
stamps, and as a commemorative silver hallmark in 1926.

In 1941,
Gabriel Hayes sculpted the wing-helmeted figure of Lugh, the ancient
God of Light, to symbolise Aviation releasing a flight of aeroplanes
on the façade of the new Department of Industry and Commerce
building in Dublin. The traditionally fabled black pig and the
salmon of wisdom (recently revived by John Kindness in outsize
ceramic form beside the River Lagan in Belfast) were among those
images proposed in 1926 by W.B. Yeats’ advisory committee for
Ireland’s controversial new coinage designs. Determined to avoid
hackneyed, obviously popular Revivalist symbols, they settled on a
horse, a salmon, a bull, a wolfhound, a hare, a hen, a pig and a
woodcock, each backed by a harp and minted between 1928-1971.

The Irish wire-strung harp, depicted as early as the 11th
century, was testament to the exalted role the harper played for
centuries in Gaelic society, so that the harp became recognised as a
national symbol of Ireland from at least the 13th century, although
it had declined by the late 18th century. The harp emblem survived,
not in its native Irish form, but crowned and adorned with a winged
maiden, as a symbol of Ireland under British rule from the late 17th
century until it was allegorically revived by the Cork-born painter
Daniel Maclise in the 1840’s, in illustration to ‘The Harp that Once
through Tara’s Halls’ and ‘The Origin of the Harp’, from Thomas
Moore’s stirring collection of Irish Melodies.

In 1854, Maclise’s
depiction of a magnificently carved but broken-stringed harp,
silently held by a bardic harper-poet, despondently witnessing the
marriage of the deposed King of Leinster’s daughter Aoife to the
Norman Strongbow, was painted in antiquarian reference to the
so-called ‘Brian Boru’ 14th century harp in Trinity College, Dublin.
This iconic instrument, the oldest surviving Irish harp and the
model for Ireland’s state emblem, appears on the coinage, the Great
Seal, on Government documents and as the symbol for the historic
province of Leinster. Held by a small, elusive female figure
representing Ireland’s ancient music, it features in Oliver
Sheppard’s 1909 carved homage to the national romantic poet,
J.C. Mangan, beside the white marble head of Roisin Dubh (‘Dark
Rosaleen’), described by the Gaelic scholar George Sigerson as “the
beautiful symbol of our ideal Erin”. The patriot Patrick Pearse
would describe this same head as the “finest embodiment of the
wonderful sweetness of Caithlin Ni Uallachain that has yet been
carved in marble, or painted on canvas”.

Sheppard’s bronze
portrayal of the Death of Cuchulainn (1912) from the Ulster
mythological echoed Pearse’s redemptive vision of heroic sacrifice,
and symbolised “the unconquered spirit of Ireland” at the New York
World Fair of 1939. At the same Fair, Evie Hone’s large stained
glass window, My Four Green Fields (1938/9), commissioned for the
Irish Government’s pavilion, represented the arms of the four
ancient provinces of Ireland in a free, purely abstract design,
“symbols and abstractions sweeping into a rich harmonious unity”.
Such was its impact that onlookers conceded “Kathleen Ni Houlihan
could be symbolised more dynamically than by a colleen in a
shawl”.

Hone retained a single emerald shamrock at the foot of her golden
harp symbolizing Leinster. Sheehy designates the shamrock as “the
most obvious”, recognizable and commonly used Irish symbol.
Nelson’s witty account of the evolution of the universal cult of
‘the wearing of the green’ (rather than the original heraldic blue),
traces the evolution of the perception of the shamrock plant, or
seamróg, seamair óg, meaning a little or a young clover, from food
of the poor to sentimental national emblem. He records the first
published record of the “shamarogue” being worn on St. Patrick’s Day
as 1689, even though its connection with the saint and the Trinity
is fictitious, and its increasing popularity after its patriotic
adoption by both Volunteers and United Irishmen alike by the end of
the 18th century. Thomas Moore’s ballad ‘Oh the Shamrock’ (1812)
heralded the ubiquitous “apotheosis of the shamrock” in the second
half of the 19th century and “its acceptance in all quarters as the
badge of Ireland and the Irish”, adopted by Church, State and
popular usage, crossing political divides.

As 19th century archaeological excavations revealed the
wondrously sculpted High Crosses at Monasterboice and Clonmacnois,
the Hiberno-Romanesque Clonfert Cathedral, the stone churches, round
towers, and great monastic settlements, e.g. at Glendalough,
national pride in Ireland’s hitherto forgotten great past
achievements was boosted, and a wealth of imitative possibilities
provided for the growing souvenir industry. Further discoveries
included finely wrought reliquaries, shrines, a wealth of
magnificent pre-Christian Bronze Age gold metalwork, and dazzlingly
intricate treasures such as the Tara brooch, the Cross of Cong and
the Ardagh chalice. The great surviving early mediaeval illuminated
Books of Kells and Durrow, the Cathach of Colum Cille and the Annals
of the Four Masters offered models for the revival of a
distinctively Irish half-uncial script, still used today.

When
these unimagined wonders were systematically studied in the Royal
Irish Academy by the great antiquarian scholars of the day,
displayed, drawn and reproduced, they provided a welcome vocabulary
of recognizably Irish motifs, such as spirals, triskels, chevrons,
whorls, zoomorphic interlacing and lettering, which could be applied
to a broad range of contemporary artefacts. They inspired poets and
writers, such as Standish O’Grady, whose fictionalised retelling of
the heroic supernatural exploits of Cuculain and His Contemporaries
(1880) and Finn and his Companions (1892) brought to life the
disappearing mythology of Ireland.

In 1904, the largest ever display of over 500 original Irish
treasures was transported to St. Louis, Missouri, to represent “the
art, history and social life of Ireland” over a period of 4000 years
at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. Set amongst symbolic replicas
of Blarney Castle, Cormac’s Chapel, the Houses of Parliament, a
rustic cottage, a Celtic high cross, a Norman gateway and a
Hiberno-Romanesque revival Industrial Hall, its unprecedented
success was seen as heralding the new, independent Ireland, ripe for
industrial development, keenly looking to the future, secure in its
past. In retrospect, it may be seen as anticipating the advent of
Ireland’s latest symbol, the Celtic tiger, a hundred years
hence.